Okay, so I don't ALWAYS love Bill Bryson.
Shakespeare: The World As Stage is a biography of the bard. Which I was and am completely uninterested in. I like Shakespeare's works quite a lot, but I don't really care about his life. So this book was kind of boring for me. It was very well-written, and I enjoyed the parts about what life was like in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, but for the most part it didn't do anything for me. Oh well. I'm eagerly awaiting Bryson's history of private life, due out this fall. That's more my kind of thing. I always wanted to read the five-volume series on the subject (the one edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby), but I couldn't really get into them. Bryson's will be one volume, and no doubt will be a bit more entertaining.